by Russell Hill
CHAPTER 21
I went for a walk around the block. I met a neighbor who was walking his dog and I stopped to pet it. It had three legs.
“I got it from the Humane Society,” he said. “Nobody wanted the little fucker and he’s as good on three legs as any dog on four.” The dog was small and black and shy. I remembered a dog that a cousin of mine had, a three legged dog named Skippy. The cousin lived on a farm. When they mowed a field, the pheasants and rabbits gathered in the unmowed center, and then the dogs rushed in, flushed them and the farmers, who had brought their shotguns, downed the birds. But Skippy rushed in too soon, got his leg cut off by the mower that hadn’t shut down yet. He recovered, and was as lively as this dog in front of me. “What’s his name?” I asked.
“Bailey.”
“You’re doing OK, Bailey,” I said as I scratched his ears. A dog with three legs doesn’t need an artificial leg. It hops about as if it were born with three legs. But Winslow wouldn’t be able to hop about. If he lost a leg it would require months of rehabilitation and an artificial leg, something he would have to unbuckle every night. I scratched Bailey’s ears once again
“You’re doing OK, Bailey,” I said. The rest of the walk was the usual, crows croaking from the trees above me, the light filtering through the trees. I thought about Skippy, my cousin’s dog. He had been a dog that was fiercely protective of the house and outbuildings. Anybody who showed up uninvited risked that three-legged dog’s attack. Maybe a dog like that would be a good thing to have around my house. A dog that would bark and rush at the door if anyone came near the house, as they had already done. I could do as Bailey’s owner had done, stop at the humane society and see if there was a dog that was territorial. A dog that I could leave in the house when I was gone.
Now I was filled with eagerness to find out how to construct an IED. And when I did, I would fashion one and Earl Anthony Winslow would be the recipient. He would not know what hit him and when the confusion settled he would know that I was the one. That the egret had struck, its long yellow beak had pierced him and there was no way that he could remedy this, no way that he could buy his way out of his predicament.
CHAPTER 22
Back at the house I googled, once again, the IED. But there was no formula for constructing one. There was plenty of information about how they worked, how much they had destroyed, but no list of the ingredients. The Internet told me that the parts were simple: a detonator that might be a garage door opener or a cell phone. The part of the bomb that set it off was an electrical charge or a small explosive charge. The charge itself was what did the damage and in cases like those in Iraq, they used the charge from a land mine. But there were other options, dynamite stolen or purchased, chemical explosives, and even mention of explosives that could be cooked up by somebody with the chemical knowledge. The device could be hidden in any kind of a package. Often the IEDs used on the battlefield were hidden in the dead body of an animal, or even in the dead body of a casualty. The injuries in the Middle East were no longer by rifle or mortar. They were mostly by these devices, buried on a roadway or driven to the point of explosion. Sometimes they were set off by someone watching, at other times the delivery person was blown up along with the victims. It was one thing to tell me that a garage door opener or a cell phone could be used to set off the bomb, but another to know exactly how such a device would be wired. What I needed were some blueprints. Or someone with the knowledge how such things worked. And I needed to find the explosive. I couldn’t purchase dynamite. I could steal some, but I would have to find out where dynamite was kept. The Internet said that construction sites were possibilities, but it would have to be construction where they were blowing up things. Road work or tunnels, coal mines. There were no coal mines in California where I lived. What I needed was to find someone who knew how to build an IED, and that would not be easy. Still, there had to be someone out there who knew how to fashion a bomb that would blow up Earl Winslow’s Mercedes. Timothy McVeigh had fashioned a bomb that blew up a whole multi-story building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh used ammonium nitrate, fertilizer, but he packed a truck full of the stuff. I needed something small enough to put in Winslow’s driveway, something that could be hidden in a small package. It would take time to find the answer, but egrets have time. They stand and wait and eventually the moment comes.
CHAPTER 23
The new job in Santa Rosa meant that I had an hour’s drive in the morning, another hour at the end of the day. I took off early in the afternoon, and stopped at the Humane Society in Novato. The building resounded with barking and when the volunteer led me into the kennels, the barking increased.
“This is what we have right now,” she said. We walked along the row of cages, the dogs pressing against the wires we passed. A Chihuahua, some other tiny dogs that yipped rather than barked, a big white-coated dog whose bark was a significant bass, a mixture of discarded or abused animals. We came to the last cage where a German shepherd, somewhat the worse for wear, coat shaggy, did not press against the wire. It lay in the back of the cage, watching us.
“This is Grizzly,” she said. “He looks calm, but he’s deceptive.” She moved closer, stopped and put her hand on the latch that secured the cage door and the dog bolted at her, slammed into the cage door, growling.
“He looks out of control,” I said.
“No. It’s a peculiarity of dogs like him. He’s intensively protective of wherever he lives. If we put a leash on him, you’ll find that he’s quite manageable.”
“You mean if I were to take a dog like that home, he would attack anyone who came to my doorstep?”
“That’s the drawback with this dog. He’s probably too old to be re-trained. Anyone who takes this dog will have to deal with that problem. It’s one of the reasons he’s still with us. A couple of times he got taken, only to be brought back because he went after visitors or the mailman or a pizza delivery boy.”
“I’m looking for a dog that can be left alone in my house, frighten off prowlers.”
“As long as he can’t get at the prowler, he might be a good fit.” She held out a leash. “You can take him for a walk. We have a big lawn area outside the back of the kennels.”
She began to unlatch the door to the cage and the dog came at the door again. “Good dog,” she said, reaching into her pocket for a doggie treat. She held out her hand and the dog stopped growling, sniffed at her hand through the wires. She opened the door, clipped the leash on the dog’s collar, and it came out of the cage gingerly, taking the treat from her outstretched hand.
“He knows me,” she said. “I’m the one who walks him. Once he gets to know who feeds him, who cares for him, he’ll do what you say. But he takes a lot of getting used to.” She handed the leash to me. “Out that door,” she said. “If you meet other dogs, he’s good with them. He’s a great dog but the only problem is that territorial nonsense.”
I took the dog outside. It pulled at the leash, sniffed at bushes, and was generally well mannered. It seemed a fortuitous meeting. When I got back inside I said, “What’s the procedure in adopting a dog like that?”
“There’s paperwork. We send somebody to check out your house. You give us some background information and if there’s nothing untoward, you’re cleared. There’s a three hundred dollar fee. It’s one of the ways we finance what we do. And there’s a two-week trial period. If anything goes wrong, you can bring the dog back. You have to register the dog with a vet. There’s a good one in Fairfax, where you live. And that’s it.”
I spent the next half hour filling out the papers, gave them a check and drove home. If all went well, I could pick up the dog in three days. The only dog I was familiar with was the puppy we bought for our daughter when she graduated from sixth grade. It was seven years old when she was killed, and my wife had given the dog to a friend of our daughter. She couldn’t bear to have the dog around the house. But when the dog grew old and cantankerous, the friend gave the dog back to me and I kep
t it until I had to put it down. And now I would have a new dog. One that would lunge at the door the next time anybody scratched at it. If anyone did.
CHAPTER 24
I found a site on the Internet where it showed how to rig a garage door opener so that it triggered an electrical charge. The switch of a garage door motor is activated by the opener. which means that electricity begins to flow into the motor. It turned out to be relatively easy to attach a battery to a switch, press the opener and the current from the battery closed the switch. All that was necessary was to connect the switch to something that was explosive. Which, of course, I didn’t have.
One of the guys on the job, working on the foundations, told me about blasting some rock for a house they had built on the ridge above Tiburon. “Big fucking ledge,” he said. “Code says you got to go down eighteen inches, doesn’t matter what the fuck is there, dirt or rock, so we just blew the fucker up. Laid mats over the top so we didn’t spatter the neighborhood with pieces of rock.”
“Where did you get the stuff to blow it up?”
“We didn’t. Ken hired some company in Sacramento. They mostly do stuff up in El Dorado County, the Sierras. Roads and shit like that.”
So I found out the name of the company and spent an afternoon in Sacramento. I talked to the receptionist and lied about who I was, telling her I was a contractor from Marin County who needed some blasting work done. I explained that it was a small job, some site work before a house was to be built and asked if I could speak to a foreman or somebody who could give me advice.
She gave me the name of one of the owners of the company. He was on a job at that time, up in Shingle Springs, where they were removing an old dam on a ranch. Could I come back at the end of the week? Or could he call me?
I wasn’t sure what it was I was going to tell him. What I wanted to know was where I could get a couple of sticks of dynamite and a couple of blasting caps. And from my research I knew that I couldn’t get them without a permit. And his company wasn’t about to hand them to me. But now I knew where their corporation yard was and obviously there were things like that stored there. I needed somebody to slip those things to me for a fee. Surely there was a worker who would be willing to do that. But only if I gave him a story that satisfied him. Something that showed I had a reasonable use for them, not something that could cause trouble. The blasting caps I could probably get from someone online, but the sticks of dynamite were something else. Still, I was determined to bring my project to an end that would result in Earl Winslow being severely damaged. If Detective Fuller managed to link me to that killing in West Marin, then I would be isolated, and Winslow wouldn’t be any wiser. If he tracked me down, he would find me already removed, and that was almost more than I could think about. No, I would find some way to get the explosive. Even if I had to steal it.
The owner of the company called me the next evening. What did I have in mind? He asked.
I explained that it was a small job, a ridge on a lot had to be removed and it was too difficult to get heavy equipment up. “We do that sort of thing all the time,” he said. “You want me to come down and take a look at it, give you a bid?”
“Not just yet.” We chatted a bit more but it became apparent that there was no way that I could get to one of his workers and forge a deal. What I would have to do would be to go back to Sacramento and steal what I needed from his corporation yard.
“I’ll get back to you,” I said.
Now what I needed to do was make an evening run to Sacramento, somehow get inside his company yard and find the explosives. They would be locked up. But according to my research, dynamite wasn’t unstable unless it was carelessly stored, and the company in Sacramento wasn’t likely to be careless with explosives. Packed in cases, it is easily transportable, and as long as the cases weren’t subject to extreme temperature changes, there was no danger in removing some of it.
I drove to Sacramento in the evening traffic, found the company yard and parked down the street. It was an industrial area and the street lights were few and far between. I waited for a while to make sure no one was staying late and then, when it neared midnight, I got out of my car. I looked carefully to make sure there was no one on the street before, using a pair of bolt cutters, I snapped the padlock. I pocketed the padlock. No point in leaving a chopped up padlock as proof that they had been broken into. I slipped inside and went through the sheds until I finally found what I was looking for, a shed that had a warning sign on the door. NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONS was emblazoned on a hand-lettered sign. This had to be the repository for explosives. There was a padlock on this shed, too, and I cut it off. Inside were cases with the label Dyno Nobel, the company that manufactured the dynamite here in the U.S. That much I had garnered in my Google search. I opened a box. Two sticks of dynamite wouldn’t be missed. I took them, searched until I found the storage of blasting caps, selected two electrically powered ones, slipped back out and put a new padlock on the door. Whoever tried to open it with the old key would be frustrated. Eventually they would cut the lock off, but they would put it down to a mix-up in locks, not to a burglary. I did the same at the front gate. Of course the new locks would raise eyebrows, but they wouldn’t connect those locks to me. I drove back to Fairfax, arriving well after midnight. I put the contraband in the garage, nestled in a box of old newspapers. Now all I had to do was assemble my IED.
CHAPTER 25
The Humane Society called me and told me I had been cleared to pick up Grizzly. I drove out to the facility and the same volunteer woman gave me a handful of doggie treats. “When he rushes at the gate, pause. Tell him he’s a good dog. Hold out your hand. Let him sniff it through the wire. You saw me do that. And open the door slowly, let him take the treats. You may have to do it two or three times. Then you clip the collar on him and he’s good to go. Good luck with him,” she said as she gave me the leash.
She was right. And within half an hour, Grizzly was sitting in the passenger seat of my Toyota, surveying the traffic in front of us
“Good dog,” I said, holding out more treats. He took them without biting my hand, a slow nibbling with his lips and tongue. At home I fixed a bed for him out of old blankets, put water in a bowl and put some kibbles I had bought in another bowl. We settled in, and I felt good. Things were falling into place.
The next few days we established a routine. I walked him in the early morning, filled his bowl, stroked him, left him, locking the door, and drove to the job in Santa Rosa. When I got home and put my key in the door I could her him rushing at the door, growling, a low guttural sound that was frightening. I opened the door a crack, said “Good dog, good dog,” and held out my hand with some doggie treats. The growling stopped and his muzzle appeared in the crack. Within a few days he was used to me, and even though he continued to rush the door, he quickly knew that there were goodies to be had when I opened the door
The instructions I found on the Internet told me that the blasting cap was to be immersed in the dynamite, and the wires attached to it, everything packed carefully. If I wanted more damage, I should pack ball bearings or nails around the dynamite so that they would be hurled by the explosion into whatever they came in contact with. I spent time in the garage, Grizzly at my feet, carefully measuring the dynamite, very carefully packing things into a package not much bigger than a newspaper. I had stolen a New York Times from a driveway and used the blue plastic bag to cover my creation. All that was left was for me to test out my device. It had not been difficult, but the Internet research had told me that it had been done by relatively unsophisticated men in the Middle East. When I was finished, my device looked like a Sunday New York Times ready to be dropped on someone’s driveway.
What I had to do was take one of the two devices up into the hills away from where it could be heard, find an isolated spot and detonate it, using my garage door opener, to see if I had done everything correctly. If I had, the next step would be to deliver the New York Times to Ear
l Winslow, so that when he drove out of his gate, he’d be sent to oblivion.
I drove up the Bolinas Road past the Meadow Club, the green golf course shining below me, and then on to where the road began to wind through hairpin turns toward the top of the Bolinas ridge. I stopped at a curve where I could hike up into the brown grass, past the oak tree line, until I was on the far side of the ridge. Any sound would be muffled by the hills; I laid my device on the ground and retreated until I was perhaps thirty yards away. I crouched down so that whatever happened would not hurl anything at me and pressed the button. Nothing happened. Too far away, I thought. I crawled on my stomach until I could see the package. I slid over until I was behind the trunk of a sizeable oak tree. I held the garage door opener out to one side and pressed the button again, and suddenly there was a tremendous blast, leaves from the oaks floated down, crows rose screaming in the air. I raised my head, looked at where I had placed the package. A monstrous hole had appeared where I had left it. And I imagined Winslow’s Mercedes upside down, the windows shattered, Winslow and his driver in pieces. It was one of those scenes right out of the newsreels, soldiers blown up by a hidden device, and I could imagine his cries, the pain that he was feeling, and I was pleased with myself. The crows had settled again, and there were intermittent squawks and the hills descended into silence. I would deliver the New York Times to Earl Winslow’s driveway and when his Mercedes came out of the gate, I would press the button of the garage door opener and finally know the completion of what I had imagined for three years. He would not be hanging upside down in the rising water, and he would not drown as I hoped he would, but his limbs would be shattered, and no amount of his money would be able to fix what I had done.
